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A
Aqua Graphic Design
Participant
December 9, 2024
Answered

Animating "Props"

  • December 9, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 616 views

Hi, I'm a complete novice to CH but I've created an animated puppet which is singing along to an imported song and dancing (all in a very basic amateurish kind of way), but the idea was to have him also juggle. My original photoshop file included all the objects for juggling but I soon realised they would need to be imported seperatly. However, I cannot seem to find a way to animate them seperately from the puppet and make them move in an arc in "free space". My puppet is standing in place (not walking or moving in the scene) and I thought I'd be able to find a method to do this. I've spent a lot of time Googling and not found a way. Do I need to export him as a video into somthing like After Effects to acheive this? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you, David.

Correct answer TheOriginalGC

Exactly. Make your animation in something like Animate and export it as a series of individual frames. Then you can import the frames as layers and apply the cycle layers behavior to it. Anything that you import into CH is treated as a puppet, including backgrounds, and I like to have separate puppets for separate actions. However, it might be possible to have the cycle animation as part of the puppet that is linked to a trigger. I must admit that I have not tried to do something like that before, but it sounds feasible.

 

2 replies

R
RGB_Maestro
Participating Frequently
April 30, 2025

Interesting post! I faced something similar while trying to animate a Stardew Valley-style character doing a farming motion in Character Animator for a side project I’m sharing on stardewvalleyapkfree.com. I also needed extra objects (like tools) to animate separately in the same scene. I ended up exporting the puppet as a video and then did all the tool animations in After Effects. Not ideal, but it worked well! Hope this helps.

RGB_Maestro
TheOriginalGC
Community Expert
TheOriginalGCCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 9, 2024

What you might consider is a cycle animation behavior for the juggling objects. Animate the juggle and import the frames into a new, empty puppet which you would position in front of the original puppet.

A
Aqua Graphic DesignAuthor
Participant
December 11, 2024

Hi "TheOriginalGC" and thank you for your helpful answer. I think I understand what you are telling me but can I clarify? Do you mean to create a "stop frame" style animation of the "juggling objects" using layers as frames in Photoshop, then importing the layers as if importing a puppet and then "overlay" this new puppet over the exisitng and apply a layer cycle behaviour? As you can tell, I am more familiar with Photoshop terminology than Ch so just wanted to be sure this is what you are suggesting. Thank you again for sparing the time to reply to me.

TheOriginalGC
Community Expert
TheOriginalGCCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
December 11, 2024

Exactly. Make your animation in something like Animate and export it as a series of individual frames. Then you can import the frames as layers and apply the cycle layers behavior to it. Anything that you import into CH is treated as a puppet, including backgrounds, and I like to have separate puppets for separate actions. However, it might be possible to have the cycle animation as part of the puppet that is linked to a trigger. I must admit that I have not tried to do something like that before, but it sounds feasible.

 

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